Quotes by Nick Hornby

We get together with people because they’re the same or because they’re different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.

He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.

For the first time, but certainly not the last, I began to believe that Arsenals moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own

easily the best thing in her life at the moment was her secret.

Even thought our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs.

I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.

When we first split up, he called me a stalker, but thats like an emotive word, stalker, isnt it? I dont think you can call it stalking when its just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door. And I only turned up at his work twice. Three times, if you count his Christmas party, which I dont, because he said he was going to take me to that anyway.

So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and with in two hours find something to feel guilty about.

Its not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and now I know.

Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldnt hear a squeak out of it.

Defeated misery is what all sport is about, eventually, if you follow the story for long enough; all sportsmen know this.

Some of my favorite songs: Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Neil Young; Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me by the Smiths; Call Me by Aretha Franklin; I Dont Want to Talk About It by anybody. And then theres Love Hurts and When Love Breaks Down and How Can You Mend a Broken Heart and The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness and Shes Gone and I Just Dont Know What to Do with Myself and . . . some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I dont know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that theyve been listening to the sad songs longer than theyve been living the unhappy lives.

Sometimes its moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then theres music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people whove read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavors, and I havent even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet... Theres plenty out there.

What did I think I was doing? What did she think she was doing? When I want to kiss people in that way now, with mouths and tongues and all that, its because I want other things too: sex, Friday nights at the cinema, company and conversation, fused networks of family and friends, Lemsips brought to me in bed when I am ill, a new pair of ears for my records and CDs, maybe a little boy called Jack and a little girl called Holly or Maisie, I havent decided yet. But I didnt want any of those things from Alison Ashworth. Not children, because we were children, and not Friday nights at the pictures, because we went Saturday mornings, and not Lemsips, because my mum did that, not even sex, especially not sex, please God not sex, the filthiest and most terrifying invention of the early seventies.

Everythings complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

“contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century. ”

“Sometimes you know youve got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasnt so messed up, it wouldnt be like that. If the world was normal, a girl being nice to you would be a good sign, but in the real world, it isnt.”

“A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly theyve all let him down.”

“You dont ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. Its all about survival; its all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in...”

“I dont mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that dont fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you cant often apply science to literature.”